Intro to Evergreen

Welcome to Evergreen’s first blog post! My hope is that this section will offer resources, insight, and the occasional levity to one of my favorite topics - understanding what it is to be human. Before all that, I wanted to expand on who I am, what Evergreen stands for, and why I’m here.

I am a married mom of 3 who has lived a lot of life in 40 something years. Counseling is my late-in-life career change, but has always been the place my heart felt called. Growing up, I joined PAL to work alongside other students and mediate for classmates; I was part of the Psychology club in High School; and later went on to pursue my Psych degree at Texas A&M. Life had other plans, though, and for reasons too long to explain here, I ended up on another path.

Fast forward 2 decades, 3 kids, and a career I did not feel any joy in, and I once again felt called to the counseling room. If you know me, you know I joke about not being a people person. The truth is, I’m not a surface-level people person. My heart work resides in working with other people’s deep and meaningful life experiences. I like the real, the raw, and the authentic. So, with a lot of life experience and now a Masters in Counseling, I opened my own practice, Evergreen Counseling Texas.

Why Evergreen? Evergreen was a natural choice for many reasons. I’m a mountain-over-beach kind of gal, so my mind went immediately to something steady, strong, and rooted in resilience. What is more quietly resilient, despite the changing seasons, than the evergreen? I see people in much the same way. The Evergreen logo represents the rings of the tree, formed over years of steady growth and seasons of strength and endurance. People are much the same - strong, complex, and formed through the experiences life throws at them.

Now, here I am, living my dream. I consider it a huge blessing and honor to sit with individuals as they share their best and worst days. We weather the seasons alongside each other in a collaborative and supportive way. My goal is to bring my lived experience as a woman, wife, and mother, alongside the knowledge I gained in my education, to walk with my clients through their own trials - to forge their own paths forward, especially when they can’t even envision their next step.

When people ask my specialty, I never know what to say. How can I be specialized when my interests are varied and people are so profoundly complex? So, the elevator pitch that I share is that I take an integrated approach to therapy with individuals, couples, and families, focusing heavily on the things I experience in my personal life. Right now, that is women’s life transitions (think transitions like marriage, motherhood, career change, divorce, loss, etc.) and mental performance coaching for young athletes (I’m raising 3, so it’s what I do daily). What that really means is that I don’t believe any singular approach to therapy is the right approach and I don’t want to limit my focus to a singular group with a singular “issue”. That would be boring and there’s no growth in boredom.

I integrate a few theoretical frameworks and evidence-based practices into the foundation of attachment theory to create a holistic and custom approach for each individual’s needs. But what exactly does that mean? I’ll get into the science of the various approaches in upcoming blogs, but for now I’ll say this: attachment theory looks at patterns of behavior that show up in our adult lives, based on our early childhood understanding of relationship behaviors. I look at those patterns, combined with someone’s life experiences that have shaped who they are and their view of life. These experiences include trauma, relationships, and the narratives they tell themselves about those things.

From there, I apply techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) to build a framework for each case. I love the science of it all, but even more, I love the people. I love sitting across from someone when they first realize that their value isn’t tied to their over-functioning production; or that the narrative they had told themselves for years was no longer serving to protect them and they finally put it down; or when the non-cryer can’t hold it in any longer and they just need someone to sit with them without judgment. Life is beautiful and complicated and it deserves to be witnessed. I love bearing witness to others’ lives.

Finally, I am a consummate student. I am convinced that someday I’ll be in my final hours of life, trying to finish reading about the complexity of being human. I bring that psychoeducation to my sessions in hopes others will find comfort in knowledge and understanding. I hope we spend time together, dear reader, either here or in a future session.

For now, I leave you with this very wise quote from the wonderful Carl Rogers -

“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”